O'Reilly Digital Media

Ok, it’s been 11 months since I’ve written in this blog. But guess what? I’m a new dad! If that isn’t life changing enough I’m not sure what is; except the following techno tale I have to tell. Through a strange intersection of factors, I was personally involved with a pretty interesting audio experiment, digital or otherwise.

Let me crank back to where I was just after my last entry… [Continue Reading].

A little while ago I wrote an article about my experience using esession.com, a web-based “virtual recording studio”. Esession struck me as having a very well-integrated collection of professional features. Now comes esession.com Version 2, and it looks like it’s going to be better - largely by incorporating more non-professional features. (Disclosure: esession founder Gina Fant-Saez has become a friend and musical collaborator, with my band The Desert Mothers, so while I can comfortably pass along news like the following, I’m out of the esession-reviewing business.)

I don’t usually recommend audio products in this post. But I think you’ll agree, this is an important milestone.

Once again, virtual instrument maestro Gary Garritan has compiled a collection of Christmas carols recorded by his customers. You can download all 19 MP3s plus cover art to make your own CD (or iTunes covers) from his Xmas page. I’m grabbing them right now with the handy Firefox extension DownThemAll.

This year, Garritan’s core software orchestral and band instruments are joined by his company’s new virtual violin and cello. (You can hear the expressiveness of the latter on Digital Media Insider podcast #7.)

What a great showcase for desktop musicians and public-domain music!

For more on Gary Garritan, read our interview, “A Personal Orchestra for Everyone.”

The D50’s electret condenser microphones swivel between 90° and 120° orientations to capture normal and wide stereo. (Click to enlarge.)

If you’re looking for the ultimate handheld stereo audio recorder, you’ll probably want to check out the Sony PCM-D1. Scott Bourne reviewed it for us last year and called it “nearly perfect.” Alas, perfection in this case comes with a $1,995 list price.

Happily for the rest of us, Sony just unveiled a more affordable version — the PCM-D50. For around a quarter of the price, this little guy has some high-end features, like aluminum casing, adjustable mics, 4GB of onboard memory (expandable with Memory Sticks), Hi-Speed USB transfer, discrete circuit boards for audio and power, and a pre-record buffer that continuously captures the five seconds before you hit the Record button. It also runs on standard AA batteries instead of those annoying proprietary types.

Mark Nelson, whose exhaustive yet entertaining reviews of five previous handheld digital recorders grace the O’Reilly Digital Media site, just got his D50 review unit. When he started his last review, we asked what features you especially wanted us to check out, and got such a great batch of suggestions that the resulting article became a true community achievement.

So let’s try it again: Let us know in the comment section below what you’d like to learn about the new Sony PCM-D50 recorder.

Sometimes the best way to overcome annoyances is to embrace them and make them your own. To protest the way rampant commercialism has corrupted Christmas carols, O’Reilly author Michael W. Dean recorded “God Rest Ye Merry Bonzo.” This “perverted Xmas music” mates a drum loop from Led Zep’s “Bonzo” Bonham with vocals, bass, sleigh bells (!), and an e-mailed guitar track.

On a more expansive note, soundscape artist Darwin Charmber just released 3D Christmas Sound Effects (iTunes link). I’m sitting in the middle of its swirling virtual snowstorm as I type this.

Happy shopping — or nothing-buying. Please leave a link if you come up with your own twisted take on this raucous season.

I feel a little like Bob Moog today — or maybe Adolphe Sax. While Googling for one of my articles, I discovered a musical instrument called the Battino:

You play it by whacking a wooden ball with a hammer, causing the ball to tumble across some pegs and strike a bell. “The balls make a pleasing clickety-clack sound as they bounce and roll down the colorful descending wooden bars and ring the little jingle bell at the end,” says one seller. “Turn Battino over and baby has fun rolling the balls down the colorful wooden bars.”

I was pleased to read elsewhere that “Battino is finished with non-toxic, water-based dyes and fragrant beeswax,” making it “the perfect gift for antsy young infants and toddlers.”

Or as the manufacturer says, “Great — now I can bang about and make as much noise as I like!”

That definitely sounds like the type of instrument I’d want to be named after me, but at the same time, it’s not a very obvious name. According to digital illustrator Allen Battino, whose ancestors came from the same Greek village as mine (we haven’t figured out our exact relationship yet), “Battino” means “small tap” in Italian. Supposedly the original Battinos were blacksmiths.

But I’m intrigued by the bigger question: If you could have a toy or a musical instrument named after you, what would it be?

I just downloaded the new Miro player (formally Democracy Player). It’s very nice, seems to organize videos reasonably well, is free, multi-platform, open source and includes features I believe all video players should provide.

But, when I got to checking it out, I was disappointed with the audio quality on many of the videos featured on Miro’s Getting Started page. No fault goes to Miro as they simply aggregate videos from around the world. Many of the media programs contained audio of unacceptable technical quality. Audio levels were either too hot (see Diggnation below) or were recorded in ways that rendered them unacceptable for listening. It was if the producer merely viewed the video ignoring the audio before releasing.

As an example, listen to the audio of this Diggnation video. Here’s a snippet of the waveform (click on image to enlarge):

Remarkably, while the Diggnation sample was shipped way too hot, the program material does not clip often because of this (yeah, hard to believe by looking at the waveform.) More disturbing, however, is that the program is littered with examples of how not to set the mic preamplifier - and we do find distorted audio resulting from this oversight. Maybe the engineer never heard of the AGC button. I do not advocate the use of AGC, but at least it will prevent overloading amplifier stages in the camera. If the audio was recorded separately, then they would undoubtedly have adequate equipment to monitor the audio gain at various stages. There would be no excuse.

Now, compare the Diggnation wavefore to the technically superior audio from an ABC News program on Miro:

The good news is that with a little knob twiddlin’, watching the meters, and LISTENING to your program, audio quality can be reasonable even with the cheap cameras and audio gear that most use on vlogs these days.

How can you improve your audio for video? Well… it shouldn’t be any different than audio for any other medium. I advocate reference levels to be the same as the DVD standard and the levels proposed in the AES Technical Group for Games: -18dBFS. That means the Diggnation audio is way too hot. Go back and compare the two and take note of the amplitude level ruler on the left side of each waveform.

For some tips and the definition of the -18dBFS proposal, see my post The State of Podcasts and Vlogs

Evan Van Zelfden’s coverage of the Project Horseshoe game-design conference reminded me of a striking moment in one of the speeches there. Mike Sellers of Online Alchemy challenged us with this question:

Original CD image by Arun Kulshreshtha

Name a wildly popular entertainment technology that suddenly perished because its stewards didn’t innovate. Here are your clues:

1. It was introduced in the ’70s.
2. It became more popular in the ’80s and hugely popular in the ’90s.
3. By the turn of the century there were 9,000 titles available.
4. By the ’10s it was the dominant entertainment technology in the U.S. and Europe.
5. By the ’20s, everyone who was anyone in entertainment was distributed via this technology.
6. And then, almost overnight, it became irrelevant.

Can you guess? Answer after the jump….

With 486 comments at last count, our discussion on the Zoom H2 handheld surround recorder is teeming with questions and tips. One of the latest struck me, because I’d been wondering about this myself. Reader Lee Wong wrote:

Help! Does anyone have a schematic they can share for making a really small, portable preamp so I can stick my Soundman OKM II mics in to the H2?

Within hours, reader Gershon responded with this link to reader Trevor Marshall’s home-built preamp. Here’s a photo of the outside; the inside looks nothing like I expected, given the promise of high fidelity. (I won’t ruin the surprise; click the photo below to see it.)

Trevor Marshall’s DIY microphone preamp for the Zoom H2 reportedly provides much better quality.

Don’t miss our extensive review of the Zoom H2 and follow-up article on turning its recordings into surround-sound DVDs.

George “the Fat Man” Sanger with his hand-tuned 1958 Rolls-Royce. He learned auto repair keeping it going; at one point he had almost enough tools and spare parts in the trunk to build another engine.

I’m just back from my 14^th trip to Texas to participate in one of the Fat Man’s amazing digital media conferences. This one was called Project Horseshoe, and dedicated to “solving game design’s toughest problems.” (That’s my back in the photo on the site; the image was from last year’s event, in which I ran a brainstorming group tasked with exploring how — and if — video games could become artistically “legitimate.”)

Videogame journalist Evan Van Zelfden was covering this year’s event, and just published this teaser. In the comments on that article, though, was a link to an earlier article about the Fat Man’s game music, and I found it mighty interesting reading.

Look for more detail from Evan over the next week, and the full reports from all four of this year’s brainstorming groups next month. If history holds, this improbable but beloved conference will have far-reaching results.

Man, I wish I hadn’t just snapped the mic off my pocket voice recorder. Today I got a hilarious call from a robotic telemarketer. Apparently hoping to add impact, the programmer set its speech synth to use a British accent. The greeting went something like this:

Hello David. This is Ian from the university. If there’s one thing holding you back, it’s your lack of a college degree.

I typed that phrase into a handful of online speech synths to try to track down the voice. (If there’s one thing holding me back, it’s probably my curiosity.) The closest match I found was Acapela Peter:

• Hello, David (68KB MP3)

Compare that to the uncultured American voice you get by clicking the “listen” link above. Are British robots more persuasive? I remember hearing, perhaps at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference, that German GPS devices don’t use female voices because Germen men don’t like to take directions from women, but maybe that’s an urban legend.

For more on speech synths, see Digital Media Insider Podcast 3: Singing Computers.

We were impressed with Edirol’s R-09 handheld digital recorder when we reviewed it, and thanks to a free firmware update, it just got better. OS 1.30 adds support for 8GB SDHC memory cards, which by my quick calculation should boost the recording capacity to eight hours in 24-bit, 44.1kHz WAV format or more than 132 hours in 128kbps MP3.

The new firmware also adds a splitting function that lets you start a new file with a single button press while recording. That could make it easier to zoom in on specific parts of an interview or concert later.

In other upgrade news, Edirol has released a windscreen for the R-09, addressing one of the main shortcomings we found in our review.

There are two things that are really exciting me today. One: Game Development as an academic pursuit is finally being taken seriously. That means Game Audio is going to get a big boost in the halls of music departments and post-production programs across the campuses of the world. The vast amounts of dialogue recording sessions, multiple versions of music cues, and interactive control schemes that constantly need to be worked out will now have a developing methodology; meaning, nobody will need to start from scratch!

When the average player experiences the sound of a typical game title on the typical game console, the sound that comes out is taken for granted. For those of us in music and audio for games, we hear the countless hours of sound effect cue lists, music file conversions, and working out how it will all perform with the game engine. With academic formalization, we are now coming into an age where the mystery of game audio can actually be studied, analyzed, critiqued, and taught as a craft. No more starting from square one. With many of the game program environments seen popping up around the country (and the world), the opportunities to integrate these fresh new game tracks are found with the classes in animation, software prototyping and post-production.

This brings me to the other thing that excites me today: new methods of accessing old material. You can teach technical methodology all you want, but where does one get the inspiration to be creative? Where does one find that rich content to add engaging audio texture to an otherwise sterile digital environment? The analog domain! I’m not just talking about going out and recording Mother Nature with your USB microphones. I’m looking at the new line of products from Ion Audio.

Originally targeted at the dance and re-mix scene, Ion has come up with a number of USB turntables for converting vast phonograph collections into digital goldmines of sound. Fair license given its due, the sounds, beats and scratches of “turntablism” could very well be the salvation of game audio! Another one of their products allows mixing and beat matching of MP3s. And to top it off, these guys also offer a USB cassette deck! How cool is that? Now you can repurpose every single cool sound that was ever generated from your old garage band tapes. Now THAT is advancement in entertainment technology!

At last week’s Apple Expo Paris, music technology was pushed into a corner, and quite literally so!

In the West corner of the expo hall, French music technology reseller, univers-sons.com, presented the “Music Performance” booth. Demoed by competent and friendly staff, visitors could take a close look at the latest products from major players in the industry like Steinberg, Mark of the Unicorn, Mackie, M-Audio, and many others.

Just a few steps away, a small “class room” environment was dedicated to 45-minute hands-on tutorials (although I dare say that the “Master Class” label was a tad too ambitious) focusing exclusively on music production software like Steinberg Cubase 4, MotU MachFive 2, or Ableton Live.

While no product releases were celebrated at Apple Expo itself, a few noteworthy products were on display that were announced shortly before the show: Apple Logic Studio, Propellerhead Reason 4, and Apogee Duet, and I’ll throw in a mystery announcement for good measure, as well.

So, let’s see what we have here…

Just a quick message to capture my enthusiasm for this new version of the Vocalist Live stomp box. I got mine today, and I feel like I’ve been given a gift that I’ve been longing for my whole musical life…

Darwin Chamber, whose “3D” soundscapes I recommended last year (see interview), is back with a new Halloween underscore.

I just received his new album 3D Halloween Sound FX (Collectors’ Edition) via iTunes gift certificate, which is a cool way to do promotion. (Now if only the e-mail were accompanied by the sound of the mail cart that used to set off the “promosexual” reviewers every afternoon at my last music magazine….)

Anyway, Chamber’s new compilation is miles above the typical bucket of clanking chains, fake screams, and goofy cackling you hear on typical horror SFX albums. His tracks are cinematic and lyrical, painting audible pictures in your mind, and the 3D processing adds extra tingle. Check it out at the iTunes Store and get ready to scare your neighborhood.

Chambers says he has a 3D Christmas album coming out in November as well. That might make a welcome change from cloying carols.

Wearable electronics continue to astound. First we had the graphic EQ T-shirt:

Now there’s the Wi-Fi finder T:

With flat-panel displays getting thinner and more power-efficient, I bet we’ll be able to walk around with rotating photo galleries on our chests soon. What will you wear on yours?

When I recently reviewed Sequel, Steinberg’s entry-level music production software, I was seriously impressed by the quality of the musical content that ships with it. If you wish to try out Sequel yourself, you can do so now, as Steinberg is offering a downloadable trial version of the software.

For obvious reasons, the trial version offers only a limited subset of Sequel’s sample and loop library — the retail version offers a whooping 5GB’s worth! —, but there is still ample content in there to play around with.

The download for the Mac version weighs in at 433MB, the one for Windows at 347MB, and you can try out the software for up to 45 days. If you decide to buy Sequel, you can import the projects from the trial version into the retail copy via a software tool also available on the download site.

To take Sequel for a spin, go to the Sequel website and click on the “Download Now” link under “Sequel Trial Version.”

I’d like to officially announce my newest podcasting endeavor: The Puzzle Podcast.

I’m co-hosting this short weekly show of brainteasers with David Leschinsky, the owner of Eureka Puzzles, a popular puzzle and game store in Brookline, Massachusetts. David is the show’s “Puzzle Guy,” while I’m the rube that has to answer the questions.

The premise is simple: we pick a puzzle type for the week, explain how it works and do an example or two from the genre. We finish each episode with a harder puzzle for the listeners to work on until next week’s show (when we’ll give the answer). If any of you listen to NPR’s Car Talk puzzler, this should sound pretty familiar.

Car Talk aside, the motivation for starting this show was actually this episode of This American Life. After listening to that show, I was inspired to do some more puzzles, so — always looking for free stuff first — I went to my computer to find some puzzle podcasts. I figured there would be dozens of them, so I was shocked to find exactly one: the NPR Sunday Puzzle with Will Shortz from the New York Times. I do like this segment, but it focuses on one specific type of word puzzle — and it is really just part of a longer radio program.

So, with the strong feeling that there should be a good puzzle podcast that featured puzzles of all types, I decided to start one. I quickly registered PuzzlePodcast.com, contacted David (who I knew from this interview I did with him for Boston Behind the Scenes), and got recording.

Now, this isn’t just an ad for my latest show. I’m writing this here primarily because of this post David Battino made on this blog about my use of microphone-enhanced hats for interviews. This is the same setup I’m using for my new show, and I still love it. I can go to my co-host’s store to record an episode with only a pair of hats, a pair of headphones, a Zoom H4 (with this add-on interface from The Sound Professionals), and my Giant Squid Audio Lab microphone set, all tucked into a small bag. Even in a somewhat noisy stockroom with concrete walls, the hats do a great job.

Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it. I’d like to invite all of you over to PuzzlePodcast.com to hear the recordings and try your hand at our puzzles. There are now four episodes posted, with new ones coming out every Tuesday morning. If you like the show, send in your puzzle guesses for a chance to win our weekly prize.

As my co-host David always says, Happy Puzzling!

Here’s the best argument I’ve seen for (and against) legalizing digital mashups. YouTube contributor StSanders took concert video clips of guitar heroes like Clapton, Santana, and Van Halen and replaced the guitar solos with hilariously bad plunking. (Plus other noises, as you can hear here):

The sync is amazing. But what’s especially funny is that StSanders’s soundtrack manipulation is so skillful that half the viewers simply think their musical heroes were stoned.

This is exactly the type of derivative artwork that should be covered under Fair Use, but at the same time, one can see how it could damage the original artist’s reputation.

(Thanks to Julian Kwasneski for the tip.)

I just got a call from a blind man who liked the sound of my podcast. He asked how he could get started podcasting. Would it require expensive equipment? I told him that all I used was a USB mic and some software. (In my case, Ableton Live, BIAS Peak, and Izotope Ozone, but there are plenty of free options as well.) The secret to my sound, I told him, was upgrading the mic, learning the software, and speaking with enthusiasm.

To demonstrate, I referred him to this before-and-after example (516KB MP3), contrasting my voice in the first episode and the tenth. The difference is enormous.

Then I offered to send him links to podcasting tutorials I’d found especially helpful. But when he told me that he uses a screen reader to browse websites, I started to wonder how helpful this background would be. Even if he could make sense of the pages (try clicking the “Listen” link above and closing your eyes), how would he be able to run a graphic waveform editor? I spend many hours cleaning up my recordings, often on a syllable-by-syllable level.

If you know of audio-editing software or techniques that are friendly to disabled people, please leave a link below. In the meantime, here are some of the podcasting tips I assembled for my listener.

Just in time for annual Talk Like a Pirate Day, I got this disturbing note from someone who read my “How to Stop Music Piracy” blog:

I recently found an area manager of a store selling illegally produced CDs, mostly dance club mixes by Hex Hector and people like that. He offered ten songs per CD. He makes a lots of money selling these illegally copied CDs. I told him he should not be selling CDs that are copies. He laughed and said no one cares. He had a catalog of 100s of CDs that he offered customers. Is there anywhere to report this or is it true that no one cares?

I replied, “Wow. That’s sad. You might try contacting your Better Business Bureau or local Consumer Action office. I suppose the RIAA would be interested too, as well as the local police.”

According to my correspondent, here’s what happened next:

A mysterious email arrived the other night. It said, “Please find enclosed two pictures of Midi Controllers. Do you know the make and model of this two units?”

The top one looks like a commercial product; the bottom one looks more homemade, but I could be wrong. Any guesses? Please leave a link. I’m off to browse Analogue Haven.

Back in the early days of music technology, there came to pass the big divide between “fresh” live music and “canned” music. Of course what we are talking about is recorded music, which has been elevated to such a fine art in these digital days.  But the big divide still exists as to the difference between a live performance and the “studio version” of a track. On stage there is no bigger stigma than to be caught lip-synching to a recorded track of your voice, or even your own band; just ask ELO, Milli Vanilli, or Ashlee Simpson.

I have a confession. When I started to think about performing without a band, back in my post-band days, I was swept away with technology. Having a computer play my keyboards and drum machine really seemed like a cool thing. I would just sing and play lead over it all just like a real band. But when it came to playing to the mechanical tempo, I thought “I may as well be playing to a recording.” And guess what? I left the computer at home and started doing just that. Several gigs of soul-less performances left me tired of the stage.

The above experience, I would put into Category One. In the same category I would put Karaoke, which is to say there is nothing wrong with this traditional drinking activity. But singing to a pre-recorded backing track is just that. There have even been technology schemes to make Karaoke more interactive, such as programmed reverb settings for the chorus and auto-harmony for the big ending. There is alot of technology happening in Karaoke machines lately. But still, if you loose your place, you are hosed.

Category Two is even more technology dependent, but can be quite fun. Using MIDI, a truly interactive musical performance can be achieved by triggering the progression of a tune to a tap of the foot, press of a key, or even the recognition of a musical phrase. If the software engine is smart enough, all you have to do is play. But how many tunes do you want to program like that? Programming environments like MAX/MSP, SuperCollider and even Ableton Live allow for very immediate performance response. Adding snippets of digital audio to the scheme brings more realism and this is exactly what is happening in high-end video game sound tracks today. When you prowl away from the action in Halo, the orchestra goes mellow. When you head into the heat of things, the musical activity gets hyper. Of course in a game, you don’t have to care about what’s going on with the music in order to enjoy yourself. So how does THAT translate to a live gig?

The winner by default is Category Three. Instead of performing on top of canned music, or trying to get canned music to play with you, this final approach is to just play finished tracks with a bit of modification and manipulation. Experimental DJs and turntablists have landed on this concept to great success. An entire industry is dedicated to mutating the recorded song. Even the traditional mixers are making a decent income. This seems most evident when “live” venues are headlined by celebrity DJs and stadium-sized festival audiences are grooving to the wheels of steel. Although critics of club DJs have been quoted as saying "a monkey could do it", as one of the most identifiable performance art forms of the 21st century, I guess it doesn’t matter what the content is, so much as how one “opens” the can.